Aleksandr Samoylenko

Aleksandr Samoylenko was born in Tashkent on 28 March 1964 and graduated from the Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow in 1988. He first worked as an administrator at the Vakhtangov Theatre, then co-founded a stage-scenery workshop with the actor Maxim Sukhanov and opened clubs and restaurants in Moscow.

He has been in the company of the Stanislavsky Drama Theatre in Moscow since 1997 and an actor of the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre since 2007, and has also appeared in productions of the Theatre of Nations and the Drugoy Teatr. He has acted in films steadily since the early 2000s.

His best-known roles are Musa Tariev in Pavel Lungin's Oligarch (2002), the magician Ilya in Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), and the dentist Andrey Antonov in the sitcom Papiny Dochki (2007–2012; the sequel Papiny Dochki. Novye, 2023). He also appeared in Klim Shipenko's Salyut-7 (2017), The Serf (2019) and The Challenge (2023).

As a director he made Roman uzhasov (2005) and Budem na ty (2006); from 2003 he produced a number of films and series. He hosts the radio programme Parilka s Aleksandrom Samoylenko on City FM.